fast-food chain, or the can ofF olgers at
home. Dunkin' Donuts has targeted
non-Starbucks customers with a slo-
gan that evokes the utilitarian ethos
of the nineteen-fifties, when the com-
pany was founded: "America runs on
Dunkin'." And, far from the world of
ceramic cones and digital scales, the
most consequential recent development
in home brewing is the increasing pop-
ularity of the Keurig coffee brewer, a
fuss-free machine that brews consis-
tent-but rather drab-individual cups
from pods full of preground coffee.
Coffee evangelists believe that cof-
fee deserves to be treated like wine,
which has fairly well-established taste
hierarchies that are supposed to corre-
spond, however inexactly, to price hi-
erarchies: plenty of people drink cheap
wine, although a great many of them
would probably switch to more expen-
sive wine if money were no object. But
what if coffee turns out to be more like
beer? There is less variation in beer
prices, and more brand loyalty at the
low end of the market: people who
drink Budweiser truly love Budweiser,
and most of them have no interest
in switching to a Goose Island ale or
a Russian River lager, no matter the
price. Microbrewers thrive, but that
doesn't mean that Budweiser drinkers
are an endangered species, and only the
most pigheaded snob could fail to see
the appeal of a cold, watery macrobrew
on a hot afternoon.
Batlle resists snobbery, as any good
evangelist must: she thinks that coffee
salvation should be available to anyone
who seeks it. But the coffee community
she loves, where everyone knows every-
one, wouldn't exist if the number of
converts weren't so small. In order for
connoisseurs to exist, they must be out-
numbered by philistines, and if the con-
noisseurs are honest they will admit that
they enjoy this state of affairs. The cit-
ric flavor of a Kenyan coffee might seem
unpleasantly sour to a novice, and so
loving Kenyan coffee is a way to show
you are not a novice.
There will probably always be a mar-
ket for small roasters who can manage
to stay one step ahead of the big brands,
no matter what the big brands are do-
ing. A few years ago, Stumptown and
other ambitious cafés embraced an au-
tomated single-cup system called the
Clover, which leaches coffee out of
ground beans using vacuum pressure
created by the slow pumping of a metal
piston. Its strikingly smooth operation,
which seemed vaguely sinister, earned
the Clover a measure ofY ouTube ce-
lebrity, and its price-about eleven
thousand dollars-made it famous.
Among the shops that bought one was
Café Grumpy in Chelsea, which is
where Howard Schultz spotted it: he
declared that it produced the best coffee
he'd ever had, and in 2008 he arranged
for Starbucks to buy the company that
made it. The reaction came quickly:
Stumptown, the first adopter, an-
nounced that it would sell all five of its
Clovers and revert to press pots. The
Clover backlash also bolstered the
move, in many leading cafés, toward
cheap but finicky methods like the
slow-motion pour-over. Not coinciden-
tally, these methods are more resistant
to corporate encroachment-it's hard to
turn slow coffee into fast food.
E arlier this year, Stumptown ac-
cepted an investment from TSG
Consumer Partners, the company that
made Vitamin Water a hit. Around the
time the deal was announced, Stump-
town rolled out a new product: cold-
brewed iced coffee, served in a ten-and-
a-half-ounce glass bottle called a stubby,
based on an old beer-bottle design.
Even with new money and a new prod-
uct, the company operates on a much
smaller scale than Starbucks, which has
been bottling Frappuccino, in partner-
ship with PepsiCo, since 1996. It's hard
to imagine artisanal coffee going mass-
market. But then, not long ago, the
triumph of Starbucks-which taught
Americans the meaning of "latte" and
popularized dark-roasted coffee, while
also requiring its customers to speak
Italian-would have been pretty hard to
imagine, too.
For a small farmer like Batlle, the
question of expansion is even more
fraught: with the acquisition of Finca
Tanzania, she can produce about thirty
tons of coffee if the weather coöperates
and the thieves stay away. She is exper-
imenting with increasingly adventurous
picking techniques (this year, she sorted
some cherry by color, to emphasize
micro-variations within her farms), and
she is building a market for the dried
skin of coffee cherry, which can be used
to make a faintly fruity herbal tea known
as cascara. When her father died, she
inherited control over a low-lying farm
near Santa Ana; shèll have to find a way
to keep the plants healthy without ob-
sessing over them, since they will never
produce great coffee. She has also gone
into business as a consultant to her mill,
J. Hill. The idea is to help other local
producers make exceptional coffee, and
to capture some of the value that her
name has acquired: beans that meet her
standards are stamped "Aida Batlle Se-
lection," and they command a signifi-
cant premium.
One weekend in July, Batlle flew to
Minneapolis to meet with some of the
executives at Caribou, a coffee chain
that buys Aida Batlle Selection. There
are about six hundred Caribou cafés,
mainly in the Midwest, and the com-
pany prides itself on being smaller and
friendlier than Starbucks. Batlle was ac-
companied by executives from J. Hill as
well as an elegant older Salvadoran cou-
ple, producers from the A.B.S. pro-
gram. The group, which resembled a
diplomatic delegation, was taken to a
series of Caribou locations in Minneap-
olis's labyrinthine downtown shopping
center. Batlle had put on a crisp white
shirt, tan slacks, and leather loafers-
she looked very Miami. Many of the
cafés were serving an A.B.S. coffee from
a farm called EI Majahual, which was
given a brief description on one Cari-
bou blackboard: "lighter roast: cherry /
creamy / semisweet." Batlle didn't frown
when she took her first sip, and she liked
the way it sweetened as it cooled.
It was tantalizingly easy: you could
walk into a mall, order a small black
coffee, and be handed a drink that
hadn't entirely forgotten its past life as a
fruit. Batlle lives in a world where ex-
ceptional coffee is the norm, but even
now, amid the third-wave boom, the
coffee that most people drink has lit-
tle in common with the beverage that
Batlle loves. Could big chains and small
delis produce something to her liking,
and do it consistently? Would their cus-
tomers want them to? And if gently
roasted, carefully brewed, high-eleva-
tion, single-origin coffee became the
norm would the coffee evangelists ap-
plaud? Or would they find some way to
call it swill? .
THE NEW YORKER, NOVEMBER 21,2011 105